VGM -> XGM : no sound

[tryphon]

Hi,

first of all, I must confess my total ignorance of music, music on computer, and music on MD.

I tried to play an XGM with SGDK, downloaded some VGM, converted with xgmtool. I tried with some MD vgms (Streets Of Rage), worked perfectly.

But tried with a NES vgm (this one, from the game Binary Land I'm actually porting to MD as an exercice) and got no sound (while everything seemed to work perfectly, vgm->xgm conversion didn't show error, compiling was fine).

Why that, and what can I do to fix it ?

Also, what would you recommend to edit vgm and/or xgm files ?

[Stef]

Hi,

Oh well actually xgmtool can convert only *Megadrive VGM* to XGM format. Others systems VGM require different sound chip so there is no way to convert them in XGM which is for Megadrive only. Sorry for the confusion, I should probably mention that in the XGMtool texte file !

[tryphon]

I was hoping similar enough hardware could work, but tried with Shinobi arcade with no success too.

Is there a way to edit VGM files, changing instruments while keeping melodies ? I heard about Deflemask, but it uses its own format, and I haven't found a way to convert between vgm and its format.

[Stef]

Unfortunately not, VGM is not really a music format in the sense it doesn't directly contains the music notes / track data but just the commands / writes sent to the sound chip. So you can see it as a really low level sound data format, but because of that the data it contains is very connected to the underlying hardware... Well it may be possible to convert some arcade using the YM2151 chip to Megadrive music as the YM2151 and the YM2612 are quite close in some way. Still the YM2151 has 8 channels where the YM2612 has only 6 channels so conversion can't be perfect anyway.

[tryphon]

So I guess writing a converter would need to know both the source hardware and the dest hardware...

I guess it'll be faster to recreate music from scratch... Which soft is worth considering for that ?

[Stef]

Exactly, it would be faster to just recreate the music from scratch in this case.
What could help is to find the midi format of this music or at least, converted to some special NES music editor format (as FAMI Tracker). So you could copy it more easily...
For Megadrive music creation you don't have many choices, you have DefleMask or VGM Music Maker.

[tryphon]

Thanks.

Deflemask seems quite good (but this damn thing is configured for a QWERTY keyboard, I didn't see how to change that) and it'll take time for me to actually do something with it. But it seems interesting. Also, I'm not sure you can import MIDI...

I didn't try VGM Music Maker. Which one would you say is easier to begin with ?

[Stef]

I think VGM Music Maker is easier probably but Deflemask is more complete and maintained so i think it's better to work with the later.